HDFC Life improves productivity with desktop virtualization

HDFC Standard Life Insurance recently deployed a desktop virtualization solution to better manage a mobile-enabled, secure work environment and save overall costs. The implementation of Citrix XenDesktop, powered by Citrix was deployed to allow employees securely access business applications and data from their personal mobile devices.

As a leading private life insurance company, HDFC Life as it’s popularly called, has nearly 500 branches in India and a customer base in over 900 cities and towns. The company started to face enormous challenge when it decided to do away with legacy infrastructure. Thomson Thomas, Senior Vice President - IT (Head Business Systems and Technology) at HDFC Standard Life Insurance informs that with the proliferation of high-powered tablets and mobiles and improvement in connectivity, the company was looking for a powerful solution that could leverage the proliferation of connected mobile devices for customer engagement in addition to their branch offices.

“The other challenge that HDFC Life wanted to overcome was linked to information security, as it was proving difficult for the IT department to enforce security in a conventional desktop environment. In the context of enabling these business imperatives, the company chose Citrix as its desktop virtualization partner,” he said.

Thomas believes the complete suite of platform and software has been deployed to enable virtualization at any level - including end point virtualization, server virtualization and for consolidating applications. After successfully deploying PoC of 30 thin clients across 10 locations, HDFC Life will opt for an organization-wide roll-out. Completed in two phases, the company currently uses 2000 thin clients that run the virtualized desktop.

According to Thomas, while Citrix XenDesktop was initially deployed for the sales function, after witnessing the host of benefits, HDFC Life has decided that the desktops of other functions such as training and operations would also be replaced with the VDI platform, where most applications can be accessed faster as they don’t run on a local PC. The company ported all its business applications namely sales tracking system, sales data and reports and the learning management system on thin client.

The deployment of Citrix XenDesktop has already yielded a host of benefits for HDFC Life. Thomas informed that the speed at which the user could access applications was phenomenally better than that in the desktop environment. Also, with 2000 thin clients being utilized in a coverage ratio of 1:3, employees don’t require dedicated terminals, thereby optimizing their terminal capacities. “We believe that this futuristic virtualization framework will be a cornerstone in our next phase of the company growth.” he said.

While many believe CIO's role is evolving and that he's occupying a key place in the boardroom, a recent study brings to light that more than half of the CIO, CTO or IT admin staff (55%) are not thanked by colleagues for carrying out essential IT tasks on their behalf.